


The Party Fast to It

by vibishan



Category: Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Genre: Age Difference, Ahab has a lot of feelings about it, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bondage, Consensual Kink, Consensual Underage Sex, Fisting, Ishmael is a straight up monsterfucker, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Power Dynamics, Pretentious, SORT OF Teacher-Student but like with whaling mentorship, Semi-Public Sex, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Starbuck 16 or 17 when they start, Starbuck does desperately wish Queeshmael COULD get a room tho, Starbuck is just enjoying the fruits of puberty tbh, Teacher-Student Relationship, Under-negotiated Kink, but the kind where it works out fine, depending on whether he had birthday during the voyage sometime, no coercion for anyone despite potential appearance of impropriety, not modern school, not sure how to actually tag what he and Queequeg get up to, specifically complicated and fluctuating power dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:14:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28141464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibishan/pseuds/vibishan
Summary: This is a cogent vice thou hast here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.Oh, sir, it will break bones—beware, beware!No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.
Relationships: Captain Ahab/Starbuck (Moby Dick), Ishmael/Queequeg (Moby Dick)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. The Fawn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strikethesun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikethesun/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest.

The harpooneer and his schoolteacher are making eyes at each other again. Like a brace of arctic hares in the autumn, they seem like a set in mismatched coats, one fidgety and full of the future in his winter whites, one still easy in the sun, not yet hurried out of his tawny summer clothes. Nimble as hares, too, when needed. 

Now, with a steaming deceased spermaceti like an island alongside, waiting for the ship to catch them up, and all their hearts pounding faster than the waves rocking the boat, flushed in the churning wake of the chase, Ishmael ss the one who cannot keep his hands from hopping along the gunwale, touching Starbuck’s harpooneer in ways he clearly believes innocuous. He strokes the shape of Queequeg’s kneecap with rowing-reddened fingers, or brushes a splash of whale blood from the skin of Queequeg’s arm with his thumb. Queequeg, basking in his victory, knows perfectly well that everyone else in the boat knows what Ishmael is about, which only adds to the broad gleam of his self-satisfied smile. Conspiracy hangs as thick in the air as salt spray, for neither Queequeg nor any other of the oarsmen will puncture Ishmael’s delusion that his darting, delighted moments of irrepressible tactility, or at least the intimacy they presage, have gone unnoticed.

Starbuck in a more even-handed mood might at least resolve to tell the man _later_ , but with Queequeg so clearly enjoying the web of attention, and the schoolteacher so absorbed in his own preoccupations and musings at every other minute not packed tight with breathless work, that Starbuck supposes the misconception might easily last the voyage and another after it without either of them coming to the slightest distress over it. Certainly Queequeg has done fine work meriting whatever harmless indulgence he preferred, and so Starbuck resolved to throw in his lot with the rest in silence.

Starbuck was never as soft as this new lad, he mused. Never so young, even half grown, Pip’s age or less and a ship’s boy, on his second cousin’s ship rather than courting misfortune sailing on his father’s or elder brother’s. But it was still another Captain Starbuck, on that long ago first voyage, with so many whalers of his own clan to choose from, so for the avoidance of confusion the mates had called him _little boots_ , like an echo of that mad imperial who earned his own moniker as an over-shod boy trailing after his Father’s army. But even then, Starbuck thinks, even Boots was not so soft, having spent his earliest landbound years still braided into the work of whaling ships which always returned to Nantucket’s port, like Rome at the center of her roads. Even before he became Boots, his life was spent awaiting and preparing for his turn to take a berth among them.

His hands then knew not only all the knots, but the ropes and the making of them, as they were sometimes made in those years, and in amongst all the other work, he remembers certain storms shaking the lightless windows, when his brothers and sisters sat huddled round one lamp, each taking turns to read aloud from the Good Book while the others twisted and treated and coiled up rope. 

He had not yet even the wits to read that font of wisdom when his father, on one of those rare, delightful returns which brought him again into his family’s company, had lifted the younger Starbuck aloft onto his shoulders, the first thrilling prefigurement of crow’s nest and masthead, and taught him to read the stars. Being sensible, the wave-striding looming stranger who was also his father had begun with the great bears, charting out the skies and pointing compass-like with their tails to the fixed beacon of Polaris, before proceeding to the more thrilling and flattering stories of heroes and hunters, Perseus and Cetus and Andromeda, Orion and the Scorpion.

Even to the farthest, dimmest memory he can haul up, like an anchor from the bed of the sea, even so far back that his fat, clumsy hands reached foolishly for the living spines of a sea urchin, quivering in their minute fierceness, somewhere between night’s darkness and imperial purple, even in that memory of near-babyhood, when he yanked his little hand back pricked and bloody, and ran from the cold tidepool up the stony Nantucket beach - he remembers then seeing the great billowing greys of an approaching tempest, and tucking his fresh needlepoint wounds into his mouth, contemplating the likelihood of it making landfall and if so, how fiercely, before resolving not to trouble his mother with the sting after all. Ignorant of the things in tide points, all half-land, but knowing already the troublesome moods of the sea.

Moods that might swallow a distracted man. But he is neither useless not clumsy, the green sailor so enamored with Starbuck’s new harpooner; he does his work swiftly and listens well, for all his occasional ambling frivolities and philosophies when not panting for breath over his oars, so Starbuck sees no particular reason to part them, even for the span of the lowering and the chase.


	2. As Previously Speculated, Much Like Rabbits*

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.

In the wake of each chase - and most particularly those in which Queequeg darted the prize - Starbuck discovered some difficulty in _avoiding_ the evidence of intimacies between his erstwhile hares. Allowing that a ship is perhaps the least agreeable human habitation for the pursuit of privacy short of the jailhouse, _still_ Starbuck swung like a heavy clock pendulum between distressed and impressed at the sheer variety of encounters that he managed, as if cursed to it, to stumble in range of observation.

Perhaps least egregious among his observations, often Starbuck twisted to glance at whatever moved in the corner of his vision, only to discover them in the act of flight. One day, it might be Ishmael towing his harpooneer belowdecks with fingers hooked into the top of his trousers, or Queequeg faultlessly descending the same stairs blind backwards and holding both of Ishmael's narrower wrists in one strong hand, or Queequeg with only a few fingers twisted delicately in Ishmael's sun-bleached hair, or - on one particularly memorable occasion - the lankier sailor nevertheless proving his mettle by hoisting Queequeg bodily over both his shoulders, to the latter's evident chagrin, to judge by his booming laughter.

It seemed that Starbuck could not in any weather search for tea or a fresh lantern wick or any other miscellany in the hold without likewise coming across them. When Queequeg had Ishmael pinned to the creaking, shifting hull, stroking them both together, every swell and roll of the ship rocking them against each other again, Starbuck made haste to scramble back to the open air of the deck before any accidental gap in their groaning harmony might permit notice of his footfalls. When Queequeg instead had Ishmael bent over a barrel, the shameless pagan's eye landed on Starbuck in the moment of his accidental descent, he flashed Starbuck a wide, bright grin and the sort of utterly self-possessed and gracious nod that made one believe Ishmael's tales that he had been a king in his own land. He snapped his hips forward, and Ishmael shouted into a rough gag which Starbuck did not remain to investigate the nature of, prior to its appropriation for such use. Once, he found them lying head-to-toe in a single hammock, sucking and swaying, which Starbuck would have sworn no two men could actually manage, but a calm sea and Queequeg's formidable balance had apparently conspired to prove him too modest in his ambitions.

It was, in short, wildly infuriating, but better constant aggravation at the inventiveness and antics of unofficial pelagic newlyweds than the creeping dread and helpless fretting he experienced when considering his Captain's continued quest, so Starbuck departed on every occasion without any interruption or reprimand, even though with the disruption they must be causing others of the crew, the whole ship's welfare nearly warranted _some_ directive to desist. But Starbuck did not do it, no matter his exasperation or discomfiture at the indiscretions. If it were truly inescapable, and not merely an appalling jinx visited upon Starbuck specifically, sooner or later Stubb would clumsily put a stop to it. Until then, their inescapable delight stung like salt in Starbuck's own wounded, worried heart, but like the salt of the sea, had something bracing in it, which seemed almost to steel his heart to whether whatever weather lay in wait for them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Footnote: The taxonomically astute reader may quibble with the author that hares and rabbits are entirely separate branches of Lagomorphia. Such a reader is kindly invited to remember that within the halls of spiritual resonance, unlike those of genetic accountancy, a whale is indubitably a fish.


	3. The Darting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck.
> 
> “I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!”

Starbuck met his not-then Captain Ahab on his third voyage, for which duration he had fervently determined by private vow that he would _not_ be Boots, and so determinedly set out with a crew amongst whom not a single member was previously known to him. Therefore it was upon the Sycorax that third mate Ahab, with last choice in the matter, found himself reluctantly and suspiciously accepting a stripling harpooner who swore to seventeen summers, unless he was charged fiercely in the name of God to speak truly, with which the Deist captain had not bothered and which Ahab promptly did, in which case he went coral-pink and his voice could hardly be heard over the waves.

Some alchemy of spite, sternness, and pride transpired in Ahab’s breast, by which Ahab determined that Starbuck should finish the voyage incontestably the most skilled harpooner of his higher-ranked peers. Any hardships Starbuck must needs endure to effect such a transformation he regarded as God’s own justice in the matter of the youth’s lies, and further for their boat to best the other mates would be equally proper recompense to them for leaving Ahab obviously the least experienced spearman, and thirdly the glory of it only Ahab’s due for the pains of effecting such a metamorphosis in the clay of the young Quaker.

Numerous deckhands had split under the steel edge of Ahab’s ambition like chips of firewood ashore, but even with the impetuousness of a young man barely bearded, Starbuck’s natural prudential constancy already composed the essential core of him, and so the axe of Ahab’s attention, instead of cracking him in twain, served only to sheer away what was ungainly, immature, and unnecessary in him. 

Starbuck more than once had staggered from the boat, arms aching and ears ringing, dimly registering the helpless pity of the other sailors that he should be subjected to such exacting scrutiny, such harsh and unremitting demands from the mate, and found himself absolutely befuddled by their sad-eyed sympathy, when he felt his mind as clear as a cloudless sky, his eye as sharp as a goney-cry, his blood sparkling with fire like the sun on the sea itself. Starbuck took every trial, every additional task and every increasingly minute point of remonstrance with an equanimity that bordered outwardly on serenity, but inwardly resembled nothing so much as Ahab’s own fixedness of intention. Starbuck, too, wished to end the voyage more skilled than either of his more seasoned compatriots, so that although the one would hiss and harangue a seemingly endless tirade on the topic of how a harpooneer might more closely approach perfection, and the other quietly and mildly toiled in diligent acquiescence, they were, beneath the sound and the fury, beneath the spray and the skin, completely united in this aim. 

Starbuck felt Ahab’s relentless gaze upon him almost like a physical weight, precise as the edge of a single fingernail and warm as blood. He felt himself flourish underneath it, felt himself harden and temper and burnish under it like fire-treated wood or hammered steel or chiseled, polished ivory. Instead of escaping that gaze as soon as he might, he sought it out. He learned Ahab’s moods and habits and fierce peregrinations about the ship just as he had once studied the shifting faces of the sea, and it seemed to him that there was much in common between the two subjects. Ahab had then the very first streaks of grey through his wild black hair, sweeping back from his temples like the crest of a wave or varnished gunwale of a ship, and in a temper or a tempest his hair billowed with the same wild whipping agitation. But this capacity for chaos hid a deeper dependable constancy, his staunch bravery and unquestionable expertise driving the ship forward as surely as the well-charted ocean currents, invisible from the surface but utterly unswerving in their powerful pathways. On a calm day Ahab would stride the deck like a king, utterly certain of his domain, with the wide rippling greatness of the dark sea like a velvet cloak barely doffed from his shoulders.

But Ahab was not a king, nor even yet the kind of king a captain is at sea, and Starbuck was determined to meet him also as a man. He had none of the audacity that touching Ahab in the boat would require, in the lingering lee of a chase, as one day Ishmael would do, but he had audacity and inventiveness enough to find other excuses for contact. When Ahab hurried from the officer’s table still half-starved, Starbuck contrived to be in his pathway with some biscuit and salt pork from the sailor’s mess, which Ahab’s pride and the strict division of shipboard souls would have utterly proscribed him from fetching for himself. 

When Ahab roamed the deck, Starbuck arranged to enjoy the sun, if he had no other labor, even if this often resulted in Ahab _providing_ him other labor. Once they had left the chilly waters of the North Atlantic behind for tropical climes, either toil or idleness might as readily be pursued stripped to the waist. He pursued this campaign with uncommon patience for a young man. Only after weeks of this innocuously routine temptation did Starbuck return Ahab’s scrutiny with a gleaming sickle of a smile, and so inform him that this other, quieter flavor of his attention had not, by contrast with his truculent tutelage, escaped his disciple harpooneer’s notice. Thus caught out as susceptible, or at least sensile, to Starbuck’s enticements, Ahab had wobbled and whirled upon the deck like some gyroscopic instrument, and for a fortnight ordered Starbuck to no additional duties whatsoever, which in no way deterred Starbuck from his operation of persistent and provocative presence.

Such retreat running counter to Ahab’s nature, once that time elapsed, Ahab promptly stormed over to him, in a paltry, petty echo of his true rage, and set Starbuck to the tedious work of stacking and checking and re-stowing all the half-consumed provender of the hold, and Starbuck, sighing deeply, brushed him on the way down, while threatening to withhold Ahab’s nightly supplement of vittles. Later that evening, upon disproving his own bluff - and passing on his secondhand bounty in such a manner as to deliberately brush their hands - he asked with all the arch suggestion a virgin Quaker could muster if anything _else_ required stowing. 

“Thou are a _lad_ , boy,” Ahab growled, snatching the addition to his repast.

“Lad enough to look at,” was Starbuck’s rejoinder, and perhaps the first moment he regarded Ahab and appeared truly unimpressed. “You’ve no objection that touches your desire.”

“Nor am I a man ruled like a beast by his passions,” Ahab returned, “Which a man twice your years might understand to be a virtue.”

“How venerable of you, protecting your virtue,” Starbuck had laughed, with the utter unrestrained mirth of young men, and even in the midst of his reluctance Ahab ached for it. “You have _taught_ me, old man,” Starbuck warned, and in his mouth that epithet became the very caress which Ahab defied the narrow confines of the ship’s corridor to remain beyond reach of, “how to pursue and not relent.”

*

Nor did he relent, for all the voyage. The hold must have been well three-quarters full of oil when Starbuck darted a fish so fiercely thrashing and rolling that a land animal would surely have been suspected rabid for similar motions, which third mate Ahab, who had started to feel the ship’s creaking in his own bones, doubted he could have pinned so neatly or so swiftly, and found his half-prepared speech on the subject of his young harpooneer’s imminent failure dissolving in his mouth like so much sea foam. 

“Anything to say, sir?” Starbuck asked, pretending to the most outrageous innocence and insolent, insincere humility.

“Mind thy tongue, boy, until thou canst make such certain work of it every sighting in a month of chases.” 

“Yes, sir,” Starbuck had answered, demure as a puritan maid, and another half his lifetime later, Starbuck still knows when to hold his tongue - but he had smiled down at the stuck whale, no doubt as obvious and unguarded in that simple expression as Ishmael with his joyfully flitting hands, and Ahab - grudgingly, resisting as fiercely as a wharf cat resists losing his fish-head to a challenger - had smiled too. Their unity of purpose connected them down in the marrow of their souls, so that the sight of the fruit of his pedagogical labors in the form of Starbuck’s sweat-sheened arms and loose-limbed victorious pride uplifted him like a deep rolling wave, sending a jolt of unbridled speed and unweathered strength that soothed his weary bones, like a drink from that fabled fountain De Leon so sought, or a hot tiny cup of Turkish coffee to the soul.

And in the same moment, with a seasoned sailor’s eye, Ahab could only regard that _sir_ with the extreme suspicion usually reserved for seemingly undisturbed water from which he _knew_ a diving fish would all too soon emerge.

Whaling is one of those professions in which a great success yields only further work, composing all the activities related elsewhere, from the cutting in to the hoisting to the squeezing and curing. So it was many hours before Starbuck had the opportunity to close with his quarry. 

In perhaps the second truly precipitous impulse of his life after first signing onto the Sycorax, Starbuck descended into the belly of the ship, and without the slightest flinching from propriety, invaded Ahab's cabin. Ahab startled from his berth, a misstep in more than one sense, for the third rank cabin was so small that the pair of them standing were pressed almost inevitably into intimacy. 

"I'll not be the crone at the cradle," Ahab had hissed at him, his voice a quiet burning sound like the line racing out. "Nor the officer trifling with the hands." That moment, and not later, Starbuck first beheld that Ahab could tremble, as the straight steel blade of conviction in him met the hot forge of his passions, not yet twisted by madness perfectly together into the barbed hook they would become.

"You needn't be," Starbuck murmured then, with the steadiness Ahab had so helped expose in him, and took the rope which he had brought, foreseeing this last protest in Ahab's brow, and looped it deftly around Ahab's wrists. "Hush, old man. I've got you."

"Thou - _impertinent_ \- " But the needle of Starbuck's intuition pointed true, and when he drew the knots tight, Ahab shuddered the second time, from top to toe, and let Starbuck draw him back down into his bunk. The following tryst could not quite aspire to continue as deftly as it began, as Starbuck for all his daring remained inexperienced in matters of the flesh, as could no longer be said of him in the hunt. But imperfection was no grave impediment; when Ahab tried to bark orders as he had in the whaleboat, Starbuck stopped his mouth with laughing kisses.

That first time, in the rush to thread the needle of Ahab's resistance, Starbuck had made the simple error of tying him still in his clothes, but refusing to be daunted, simply explored what he might by releasing every button and letting the rest, sleeves and boots and all, hang half-off his captive. "Trust me, old man," he murmured against Ahab's neck, and bound another loop of the rope around Ahab's ankles, and set to exploring him, learning their joint appetites step by stubborn step, by touch and by taste.

*

So Ahab was Old Man in his cabin, or when Starbuck felt particularly overcome with fondness for him, but most often upon deck and always in the whaleboat, they resumed the proper forms of rank - though even these grew less scrupulous with time. Near the end of the voyage, nearly napping in the last of the Southern sun before they returned to Nantucket's grey waters, Starbuck blinked at a sudden looming shadow only to find Ahab, just as he had in days of Starbuck's deliberate rambunctious temptations, providing him with new industry to absorb him. But this time, as Starbuck washed down a broad section of the deck, Ahab made no pretense of not watching, nor Starbuck of not knowing, and afterward they barely had Ahab's cabin door closed before their clothes were heaped up and their hands on each other. 

Starbuck soon revenged himself for the tantalizing chores. He bound Ahab tightly, hand and foot, and took him hard first, stroking just enough to stoke Ahab's desire but not enough to quench it, and after he had his own pleasure, he luxuriated for an unmarked hour, sucking the salt from Ahab's fingers, kissing the strange soft place beneath the hinge of his jaw, stroking the stout strength in his thighs and calfs, even discovering a ticklish speck at the backs of his knees, which indignity mortified Ahab as no other element of their congress ever had. Only after stretching all this did Starbuck take the oil for his own use, and climbed astride Ahab at least, riding him with the inexhaustible enthusiasm of youth until Starbuck enjoyed an encore and Ahab at least had his release.


	4. Formless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

After the shock of the Squid, Starbuck feels half a ghost himself, clammy and hollow, echoing with ancient lamentations whose words he cannot decipher. He desperately wants the tea which on three separate occasions he has turned back from locating, only to find the pair of them once again rattling the bales of oddments and boxes of hardtack. Starbuck slowly, abjectly, presses his forehead against the damp, gnarled old wood of the hull, and wonders if he has the fortitude to retrieve his succor, the lovebirds be damned. 

He hears a _splash_ , and a laugh faintly muffled by distance, and he realizes they are cavorting in the deepest part of the hold, amidst the ooze of oily bilge water. He doesn't know _what_ they could possibly find conducive about the location, but resolves that it is less than no business of his, and more importantly, at that depth, he stands a good chance of retrieving his tea without enduring another of Queequeg's serene satisfied smiles.

The schoolteacher is lecturing, a half-gasping babble not terribly unlike his usual ramblings, and the wild fancies of his erotic imagination are so utterly novel and so earnestly delivered that Starbuck finds his scattered, inattentive search drawing closer to the pair in spit of himself. 

"- drawing me down - _oh_ \- into the very halls of Poseidon, the shining curve of - a vault of lustrous shell like the face of the moon in the night of the deep - AH - and the, the -"

"Eel drag you," Queequeg interjects, as Ishmael starts to stutter.

" _Yes_ , wrapped around, so sinuous and sinister, the herald of greater - creatures - dragging me, down, before the court of monsters - all arraigned around, dark scales and undulating ooze, and the great _eyes_ watching, pale eyes and pitch eyes and every eerie color between - bigger than my head, bigger than me, all staring at the thrashing helpless little mariner - and - and then - one of them - which one -?"

"Shark lord test you," Queequeg answers, and Starbuck hears something rattle, and he _has_ to glance between the stacks and barrels -

His breath nearly stops in his chest, and he cannot decide what to be shocked over first, whether the fistful of utterly real shark's teeth, strung onto some sort of bracelet loop, that Queequeg is _dragging_ slowly over the skin of Ishmael's shoulder, or the yards of oil-soaked sailcloth wrapped around what seems like the entire length of Ishmael's arms, rough and slick and utterly immobilizing, or the dark streak of the blindfold over Ishmael's flushed face, or the fact that his harpooneer's _entire arm_ seems to be disappearing inside -

Starbuck abandons the hold and the tea, and instead helps himself to a goodly measure of Stubb's whiskey on his way out.


	5. The Tiger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then.

Starbuck flees the hold with the rattle of the the shark's teeth in his ears and the shine of the gold piece on the mast haunting his eyelids, harsh as the golden burn in his throat from his pilfered brew. Even all his shock and suspicion cannot quell the heat of those _oilcloth wrappings_ , and his feet take him unerringly to the Captain's cabin, for all he knows that their old rope games are long done, for all he knows how little of Ahab is left to spend on aught but his vengeance now. 

He does not knock, as he has never knocked for the old man, (rather than the Captain), the token of it so longstanding between them that Ahab looks briefly startled from his brooding - but only briefly. "Think ye -" Ahab starts, suspicious that Starbuck is here to argue or plead with him, to counsel once again against his driving course. 

Starbuck is not here to to try that fruitless work again. 

He stops the recriminations with kisses as though he were young again, although there is nothing left of that easy, delighted playfulness in the kiss itself, save the hunger. His hands twist in the old man's hair and Aham bites him, harsh and vicious. Starbuck doesn't know who they are to each other, any more. Not beyond Captain and First Mate, and even then - he never knew the worlds for the way they were with each other, the way they could pass control and command back and forth like one copper cup, sipping the same clear water, feeling the heat of each other's hands on the metal. They've lost the cup and spilled the drink, somewhere in great basin of tears not receded since the Flood. Ahab hasn't let Starbuck touch him with rope, or even grip him too tightly with bare hands, since before the loss of his leg. Not since he sweated and screamed feverishly through the gales on the return journey. He could only be trussed fast for his own safety, in a hammock where he could not strike his head against a board with thrashing, and Starbuck, needed desperately to guide the Pequod through the gale, had to leave him swinging in his agonized delirium.

When he emerged from that horror, he let Starbuck touch him a little, a soft single kiss, light hands under stiff clothes, but none of the more ardent intimacies, and never even to approach with a line. Now, they are all askew, Ahab blowing with no anchor, and Starbuck overmanned by his anger, too weak and heartsick or simply too much a mortal man to outlast or puzzle through Ahab's fresh madness. But he will have this anyway, even pitching and yawing, even strained and strange. From true bitter misery he would start back as if burned, but he will not be cowed by teeth and scowling.

Starbuck drops his grip from Ahab's hair and grabs his coat front instead, hauls the bony old man round in the second it takes Ahab to claw at him, and then Starbuck is the one pressed up against the desk, and Ahab the one pinning him in, leaning his weight on his mate as much as his ivory leg. Ahab catches one wrist haphazardly, and does not stop kissing him. They rut against each other like less shameless sailors than the two Starbuck left, hurrying to hurtle through their pleasure before they might be found. Starbuck will bruise unevenly, his back from the edge of the desk, his collarbone from another hard bite, but Starbuck does not care, as long as the loss of the cup is not the loss of them entire.

When they finish, rumpled and lurching, and Starbuck barely has time to make himself presentable before Ahab harries him back out of the cabin, he is not at all sure if the point is proved. 

*

The Pequod meets one ship and another, crawling over the waves after Moby Dick, and Starbuck grows more and more somberly certain that it is not, until he stands outside that same cabin door, neither knocking nor bursting in, but staring into the shine of the musket like an idiot staring into the sun.

He leaves the musket on the rack. He does not turn back to the deck, and he does not knock. 

Even restless, demoniac sleep is still sleep, and the sight of Ahab cramped and askew in his berth, eyes darting under shadowed eyelids, vulnerable in this too-little sanctuary, strikes a powerful tenderness into Starbuck. Ahab does not whimper, but something in the way he holds his bony arms tight to his chest reminds Starbuck horribly of the gales on the last voyage, which the lashing chorus of the ocean without must even now be dripping its recollection into Ahab's dreaming ears. 

Starbuck closes the door quietly and crosses the room in a stride and a half, and insinuates himself into the bunk, propped on his elbows over Ahab, and strokes his wild hair from his riven forehead, and takes tight hold of both wrists at once. Ahab thrashes awake, or tries to, but Starbuck holds him like Janet embracing Tam Lin. Ahab snaps at him, striped in his fury, and Starbuck does not kiss him this time, but takes every furious invective, finally resting the weight of his own weary head against Ahab's brow, as though he could press out some of the bitterness from it like oil being squeezed from the sperm.

"I know, old man," he says rough and quiet, when Ahab's breath finally fails him. "But this time I'm not letting you go."

The transformation is not so obvious as that years-ago shudder in the ropes; Ahab still fights him, struggles and snaps his teeth, and Starbuck has a bloody jaw to show for a moment when he pulled back too slowly. But it is Ahab rocking his hips hard up against Starbuck, Ahab who gets his one remaining ankle hooked around Starbuck's calf rather than kicking the breath from his belly or wrangling him to the floor and dumping him there; Starbuck has no doubt at all that despite near three decades and one less limb between them, Ahab could do it if he meant to. It is Ahab who kisses him first, this time, however roughly, and Starbuck holds him fast through it all.

When Ahab has half exhausted himself, protests and pleasure both, Starbuck kisses gently down the rough-hewn weathered skin of his chest, the slight softness of his belly, neatly laps the bitter spend from Ahab's skin, which makes Ahab hiss in surprise or sensitivity or satisfaction, too wordless to tell. Starbuck kisses a hipbone, and the inside of the truncated thigh, and sets his hands on the ferrule of the ivory leg. 

"Lad - Starbuck - _what_ -"

"Trust me, old man," Starbuck repeats, in a low rare growl, and Ahab does not finish the question. 

Starbuck unfastens the ivory leg from its aching mooring, pressing gently and carefully, feeling the knots in Ahab's flesh as though the rest of him were neither meat nor bone but wood. And then, setting the ivory aside along with his own rumpled breeches, Starbuck kneels there, hands braced on Ahab's shoulders to balance himself, so that his knee sits where Ahab's cuts off, pressed skin to scar, and his living leg rests backwardly in the very space where Ahab swears he feels his lost leg like a ghost.

"You always feel it, you say. Can you feel me now?"

"Aye," Ahab answers, raw, choked, face rigid and eyes shining.

"What do I feel like?"

"Heavy, damn you." And, "Warm."

Starbuck kisses him again, gently this time. Ahab kisses him back not so much gently back as _lost_ , open but not easy, hungry but lonely. Starbuck kisses him a long while, and Ahab reaches to stroke him where he hangs half-mast between their bellies, tired and worried and still drunk on the other's presence, and easily brought fully to his own crest, his arms shaking faintly where they hold Ahab down - or hold himself up - or simply hold, his toes curling on the leg he shared with the invisible spirit of the lost one.

"The storm?" Ahab asks, too long after that, tentative in a way that sounds unsuited to him. Starbuck bites his cheek and tastes copper; it is a captain's question, not his old man's. But he came below because he _had_ news.

"Endurable. Go back to sleep, old man." 

And in the surest proof that his previous rest served him worse than frantic activity might have, Ahab did so. In only minutes his eyes closed and his breathing settled out slow, his arms no longer a straight-jacket memory, his mouth no longer so tightly clenched. As Ahab slept, Starbuck plucked a single hair from his own suspicious head, and looped it round the ivory limb and knotted it tight, before securing the sturdy fellow back to his post. But it is not merely the ivory he ties, he thinks, brushing the unfeeling spot with a kiss. He ties the ghost which is also there, the leg that aches, the very place where they were one flesh - that is where he fastens his line.


	6. Fast Fish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to do.

Nevertheless, when the storm clears and the compasses reverse - nevertheless, Ahab is untouched by the lightning. Ahab's course is unaltered. Nevertheless, when he sights the white whale, they chase.

A man may have a fast fish who fights him like the very devil, who tears across a mile and more of ocean seeking to escape, and so it is with them. Even darted fast, to catch and keep a fast fish, one must persue it. There is one God in heaven and one lord of the Pequod - 

But when Ahab lowers into the sea to finish out his madness, then he is _not_ on the Pequod. Then, surely, Starbuck becomes lord in his absence. He finds he is no less determined than his captain, a determination which is not madness but perhaps the mirror of it, on the far side of sanity, as the frozen poles are opposite from one another across the balmy sensibility of the equator. He is anti-mad, is Starbuck, steady as the stars themselves. On the third day, he casts aside his orders to remain aboard, gathering his harpooneer and his oarsmen and even the mad boy pip, whom he takes in a fit of superstitious inspiration for a compass in the land of madness, when all their compasses are addled.

When Ahab set forth from Nantucket he left a woman already widowed; when he left the Pequod in spite of all pleas, did he not leave behind a successor like a second widow? Did he not mark himself already dead, though Starbuck could not bring himself to strike him down during the storm? Starbuck could not, but his own warning rings in his his ears, _Ahab beware of Ahab_. Starbuck left the musket and pressed his advance upon his captain on the strength of a single hair, his own hastily-woven gleipnir chain. But Ahab has brought Ahab’s doom, though still breathing. 

With his Captain already dead, the Pequod is Captain Starbuck’s. And Captain Starbuck is not beholden to the orders of a dead man. 

He has on his thinnest line a fast fish. He has defied his conscience and his hope and perhaps God in his devotion for Ahab, but now he defies Ahab to follow Ahab, and lowers his boat to the pursuit.

*

As the skewered monster drags him down, Ahab feels as a fire feels, fighting its own quenching. His throat is all fire, and with an animal panic nigh immediately outpacing his usual ability to hold his breath, his lungs too are fire, all through him. But the water is _cold_ , twenty feet down from the sun - thirty - even with his eyes shut against the salt sting, he can see the darkness deepening behind his lids. He can feel the crush of it, squeezing him, limbs and chest and head, and something surrenders in one ear with stab of fresh agony. Clouds of cetacean blood billow around him, thickening the water and filling his nose with iron along with the salt, the water only heavier with it, pressing in toward that sizzling fire in his straining lungs. 

Ahab thrashes, worse than fruitless, and feels the raw gall of the line slicing deeper into this throat, with only brine to salve it. He thrashes, because the dumb animal which slumbers in every man, wishing only to be fed and sometimes held - that animal knows he is drowning. It struggles on his mind's behalf, a mate with no more need for permission to save him than Starbuck. This haphazard desperate instinct towards a swimming motion, as powerful to move him against the dragging, dying anchor of the whale as a sparrow flying into a hurricane, nevertheless proves superior to surrender. Ahab's flailing hand smacks and seizes his own shattered leg, broken and replaced the day before, tumbled into the sea when Moby Dick scuttled his ship. With that knife furnished and provided by his enemy, in the full dizzy airless throes of bestial frenzy, he blindly saws at the line around his throat. A whale’s own tooth, his own splintered ivory shinbone, bites through the line pulling him after his quarry to the depths.

Even after four decades at sea, the urge to gulp his breath the instant the constricting viper looses its garotte almost overwhelms. But he does not gulp, iron-willed to the last. He tries even to stare down, one last long look after his foe, but with the depth and the blood (his - the whale's - the world's -) he can see nothing at all. He has only pain for his trouble, eyes stinging as if the darkness were sewn onto them with a needle. He can only strike up, blind, by the feeling of his own lifting lungs and against his own heavy black iron heart. He strikes hard with his one flesh leg, and lets the other, (just as good, as good a leg a man ever had, bearing him through terrain never meant for man, for all that he slandered it on snapping the eve before) finally sink away from his grip, as he needs both hands to haul his way to the open air.


	7. Epilogue: A Harvest of Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

"Can Pip see him?"

"Pip is away - beneath the sea - he should not have jumped from the whaleboat -"

"Ahab is beneath the sea, too. I will not let you jump again. Here, see - Queequeg, hold his wrist. But below the waves, there is another ghost now, tarrying tight-fisted by the shore of the coldest river, unwilling to pay passage from a lesser boatman. Can Pip see him there, in the shifting realms?"

"Oh - _oh_ \- yes, yes! Pip has no coin to pay, so he sees all the travelers. He was kind - he was a kind of kin. Was he not? We are all the same meat beneath the skin. Bones bleach to the same shade. Pip would cry out gladly for seeing him, but voices are only for sirens there - they will have his voice, too, if he lets it loose, and they shall fill him up instead with cold -"

"You cry out for him, then. Where lingers his ghostly kin?"

"There, sir - there - he is waiting to be born, from the first baptism, which is blood, just there - but watch the river's edge!"

This remark only buoys Starbuck's perverse faith in the raving boy, for if anything upon the face the mortal world might truly be called an eddying edge of Styx, it must be that dark swirling funnel fueled by the Pequod's doom. He strikes deftly with his steering oar, skirting the very froth and flotsam of death. He does not dive in, but nor does he desist from their course, sailing always as close as possible to Pip's eerie heading. When Ahab's white hair streams almost indistinguishable from the foam, his face corpse-white and his throat a collar of oozing blood even the ocean had not washed away, already they wait alongside.

Starbuck throws Ahab a line, and hauls him in.

*

Though Starbuck bandages him carefully, and soothes his throat as he can with precious sips from their only skin of freshwater, Ahab speaks not a word. He stares and glares, gasps and winces as the fresh weals are pressed or jostled, but he gives no cry, no orders, no answers. Starbuck presses a gentle hand to Ahab’s burned, bloody throat, where specks of pink already appear almost as freckles through the ripped fabric of Ishmael's shirt. This, he does not need Pip to elucidate. Although the great veins and arteries of heartsblood were near miraculously spared, Ahab's organs of speech have been sliced to ribbons, as silent as harp strings similarly slashed. "So, the whale took your last breath, even as ye his?" Well. fitting enough.

Ahab glowers at him, wavering only slightly from exhaustion and the still-pounding ache in one ear.

 _I told you to stay with the ship,_ Ahab wants to howl, pointlessly, but his new lameness chokes him almost as a mercy, sparing him his Quaker’s thoughtful lifted eyebrow and polite, subservient, infuriating query, _what ship?_

*

They search for other survivors, but find only two, Perth and Fleece, both huddled in the bottom of a Try Pot turned makeshift boat, though they each have burns from sitting in the sun-soaked metal of the pot, and it proves an extremely slippery vessel to attempt to climb out of. Throughout it all, their boat rides low in the water, and they have no provisions and little water, but Starbuck feels strangely certain of rescue. Fate would not preserve them all from the sinking ship only to perish under the pitiless sun. But he fears, nevertheless - a silent man cannot captain a ship, and few men who have been captain could endure to crew for another. Certainly, his proud old man is not among them. But Ahab leans on his shoulder as he did the night before, when his splintered leg would not bear him, and gradually even that pride fails; he rests his head in Starbuck's lap, who shades him as best he can. It was not the ocean they saw in each other's eyes, so perhaps they will yet find their cup again.

Starbuck's confidence is rewarded when the Rachel finds them, though he fears the once-spurned Captain Gardiner may see Ahab, who denied him in his grief, and toss him promptly back overboard, and Starbuck with him, monkey-roped twins as surely they are now. But as soon as the boat reaches the Rachel's deck, Pip cries out, vaulting the gunwhale, scrambling over to a pallid, stunned child near his own years, exclaiming, “Pip! Pip! Oh, you found him! You found - in his watery grave, has he kept you good company in yours?"

This weary waif breaks into a slantwise smile of his own, though his face the moment before seemed as though all hope of happiness must have been ground out of it, like stones ground into sand. "Oh - yes - it should have been very dreadful, if I were alone. But my coffin was cut for a man, so there was room enough for two."

Starbuck and Captain Gardiner experience almost mirrored revelations, as Starbuck spies the life buoy caulked from Queequeg's coffin a little ways off on the Rachel's deck, and Captain Gardiner glances from the spectacle of his silent, stranded son suddenly speaking again, circuitously but sweetly, only to behold Ahab's ruined countenance, and abruptly remember the buoy's source. 

"You must all come below and rest," Captain Gardiner announces, with all the graciousness of a man recognizing that even the callous and cruel may sometimes be an instrument of providential blessings. And so, two by two, the lovers and lost souls alike obey, and are welcome.


End file.
